I interpret the article to say the "myth" is exactly true. It may also be true that Semmelweis could have done a better job communicating his findings and persuading others. But that doesn't take away from the truth of the basic story.
> Innovation takes more than having ideas and expecting others to immediately accept them.
This absolves the people who said, "Eh, he's just a nut" (as he was). Instead of calmly asking if he had something there, however badly he communicated it.
The idea is not responsible for the person who holds it.
He performed experiments and showed that his washing regime dropped the maternal mortality rate at his ward from 12.3% to 1.27%. That's a 90% reduction in deaths!
>This absolves the people who said, "Eh, he's just a nut" (as he was). Instead of calmly asking if he had something there, however badly he communicated it.
Why shouldn't they receive their absolution? No one has time to evaluate every idea they come across. As a matter of practicality, one has to put poorly communicated ideas or those for which the data collection is sloppy or otherwise badly done lower on their priority list.
People's lives would've been saved if Semmelweis had been taken more seriously, but how many other advancements would have suffered if everyone followed up on every poorly thought out and represented idea and didn't prioritize?
This is not so much about prioritization but outright dismissal and comfortably not questioning the status quo.
Reminds of many surgeons refusal to use checklists a while ago despite showing general improvement in outcomes. Nobody wants to admit they could have done better, change their routine and think they don't need help as they're already really good. [1]
Wrong. Dead wrong. That's judging people's ideas by how pleasant they sound, rather than what they say.
When you say "evaluate every idea" you ignore the fact that that's what a scientist does: he or she should be trained enough to know when, "Oh, that's interesting!" or "Yeah, I guess I can ignore that." is the right answer. Their judgement of which is which is a good way to evaluate them.
You said, "As a matter of practicality, one has to put poorly communicated ideas or those for which the data collection is sloppy or otherwise badly done lower on their priority list."
"poorly communicated" is perfectly well characterized by "how pleasant [it] sounds"
You try again. Maybe you don't like the characterization but it's fair.
If we still use math 100 years from now, we'll still use SQL. It's a fine way to query relational data, and relational data is a fine way to model reality.
I'd like to hear from people that think I'm wrong.
> If we still use math 100 years from now, we'll still use SQL.
Those are incongruent. Do you mean Western notation?
> It's a fine way to query relational data
It's quirky, but good enough for ad-hoc queries that I think it will be hard to overcome the momentum in that area.
It's not fine for application work, where you need things like composition. We've tried to solve those problems with ORMs, but the ORM is starting to fall out of fashion due to a number of problems of its own. SQL is not a great compiler target. I do eventually see something lower level built for programmers, not data analysts, rising up here. If SQL is compared to Javascript, something akin to WASM, perhaps.
ORMs, when best used (and we use them even though we're pretty SQL literate and maintain a lot of SQL) will survive forever, nothing beats an ORM for really dirt simple expressions that you want to be trivially testable. Never in my life do I want to see someone write an UPDATE query against a single table with no shenanigans with dynamic field support using string gluing to properly stitch in all the columns - this is something a known tool can do better, this is a great opportunity for an ORM.
A non-great opportunity for an ORM is anything I'd call a "report query" (some complex read-only query involving a lot of JOINs, a bunch of WHERE clauses and possibly some nested aggregation for funsies) - this is where you pull out the SQL (or alternative query language!) because an ORM will struggle to properly support all the functionality you need and because trying to tune a query being produced by an ORM (even just to make sure it's well aligned with logical indices) is a task that yields nothing but endless frustration.
Never in my life do I want to see someone write an UPDATE query against a single table with no shenanigans with dynamic field support using string gluing to properly stitch in all the columns
These are just convenient features that most ORMs provide and can exist entirely outside of ORMs, they are not the primary purpose of ORMs.
You are correct by their design. But by usage I've found that to be by far the most valuable thing that ORMs deliver. Making use of ORMs to power an ActiveRecord system in your codebase has only ever, to my observation, lead to pain. Querybuilders that are equipped with more advanced functionality around type security and response decoding are quite a valuable tool.
I meant "still use math" as a proxy for "still use formal languages to communicate".
Maybe in 100 years AI will be so powerful that we'll just ask our question in natural language and get the answer we need. Or maybe in 100 years AI will have harvested us for the iron in our blood. Either way we wouldn't need SQL anymore.
Then the statement resolves to "If we still use math 100 years from now, we'll still use math.", which is a rather silly statement. SQL and Western notation are interesting to compare in that they are the dominant, but not exclusive, languages used to describe their respective mathematical domains.
SQL does not fully implement Relational Algebra or Calculus, which are isomorphic.
See Many of Chris Dates' books and things like Tutorial D which do meet the ALgebra.
SQL is near enough the theory to work and also has had so much effort put into making it work fast, reliably and scale for volume that a new language has too much to overcome even if it can deal with all cases. So it won't be replaced soon.
However 100 years is longer than SQL had been around so a proper relation server could come around, there is just too much uncertainty.
It's pretty obviously silly to have an unavoidable text parser in between code and data. We've reached the point where it's fairly low overhead, but it's still not nothing.
Could this be a protected concerted activity? In the US, there are some basic protections when two or more employees work together to improve the conditions of their employment. I don't know what does or doesn't qualify for this protection, though.
And there are probably not clearly defined rules for this. What would need to happen now is for them to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board and that group could make a ruling about whether this is protected activity or not.
I had the "oof" but I got rid of it by lifting weights, starting at age 51. I don't lift much anymore, because I kept hurting myself doing powerlifting. But it got rid of the "oof."
I'm sure there's a happy medium lifting enough to keep healthy but not so much that it causes injury. I've never been good at doing medium.
My initial thought was that I didn't like that prescription. But I'd like to know _why_ the author thinks "joke less, laugh less" would help with divisiveness.
I'm not the author, but I was in a Teams chat with my manager and another guy (that we needed help from). The other says something, my manager posts a huge frowny face with no context and the other guy kinda disengaged from the conversation. Privately, I reached out to both. I told my manager their reaction was harsh. My manager said "I was joking, they knew I was joking". The other guy said "I worked hard on that, the negative reaction was completely unwarranted." In the end, I was able to smooth things over, but I wonder if we could've finished up sooner or if my manager cashed in a little too much good will because of a dumb emoji.
I guess the point is, it's not always clear what is a joke (or by extension, what, or who, is being laughed at).
I've been able to laugh and joke around with people I work with from all over the globe (literally), its one of the most valuable tools I have found to create a sense of ease of friendliness in the workplace. Self deprecating humor is also a great way to show that you don't take yourself to serious and to ease tensions when divisiveness may arise. I think the better suggestion is to not talk about politics and don't gossip.
The problem is that what you think is funny may be uncomfortable to a other people, and for some reason, it's always the funny guy who thinks that the onus is on everyone else to shift their behavior to accommodate his comfort.
It gets worse when half the team is laughing, and the other half are praying for you to be struck dumb already.
It's really not that hard to keep your forms of merriment clean and appropriate, if you are a generally good-natured person that likes who you work with and wants to make them laugh.
That said, there are certainly people that can only perform humor as a zero-sum game. But in my experience they are also generally the kind of people that subject their coworkers to uncomfortable conversations in a myriad of other ways.
If you come into a tight culture of people who will riff all day on harmless puns, or crack references to old Jersey Shore dramas, or whatever, it can be acutely alienating.
I wouldn’t personally want to work in a place so sterile, but I also feel confident in my ability to float around and either find a lively culture that suits me or work my way into a culture that once felt alienating.
But not everybody feels so confident in that, and sterile results-focused work communities get the opportunity to have these people thrive.
That sounds good for those people and for those organizations.
As long as the whole job market isn’t made to look that way, I’m not sure there’s a big critique to make.
doesn't 'divisive' generally mean to divide, as in separate into opposing factions? What you're describing seems more like 'diversity', which is pretty different I think.
This particular manipulation of language consists in the confusion of cause and effect.
Diversity of opinions exists. It's good and it's accepted to be good, even if it makes feel some people bad sometimes. Freedom of speech requires effort to accept we're different. To make it sound bad, you need to create a frame where everybody agrees on everything until some evil "divisive" person creates division.
Since it's included with "gossip" I assume it's to avoid insulting people (intentionally or accidentally), but suggesting that humor is off limits entirely is an outrageous over-correction.
Ironically I think the author has included an incredibly divisive opinion in a post about being less divisive, and has therefore dissolved any authority on the matter.
It didn't suggest any such thing though. It said joke and laugh less. It didn't forbid them.
Humor that doesn't offend can be hard to pull off. If you crack jokes regularly, odds are high some of them will be offensive.
Most people are quick to assume you are laughing at them, not with them. So if you are laughing a lot at work, odds are good someone will take that as mocking, as disrespect, as you not being adequately serious about the job.
If you are careful with humor, you can do good things with it. People who joke habitually are probably not being careful with it.
Sounds like maybe you need some new coworkers because where I work we laugh and joke around all the time and nobody ever gets offended (or offers offense).
Most jokes build on shared context, therefore jokes are inherently exclusionary and discriminatory by excluding people without the shared context. Avoiding most humor is thus a good idea.
